Trusted Reviews reviewed the ATI FireGL V7350 - an 'ultra high-end' card featuring 1GB of graphics double data rate 3 memory.

The V7350 is already outclassing the Quadro FX 3450 and 4400 in the Unigraphics (UGS-04), SolidWorks (SW-01) and 3dsmax (3dsmax-03) tests, and is nearly on par in Pro/Engineer (Proe-03). It even managed to reel nVidia's flagship Quadro FX 4500 in with 3dsmax, although the 4500 was noticeably ahead in other scores. We fully expect the V7350 to pull closer to the 4500 as its drivers mature, although it has some way to go in Pro/Engineer. Our workstation was also based on Intel's 915 PCI Express chipset, rather than the higher-performing 925, 955 or 975, which would have had a small effect on our results.

We also ran Maxon Cinebench 9.5 and 3DMark06. The Cinebench results were very similar to what nVidia's Quadro FX 4500 achieves on the same platform. The 3DMark06 score isn't as high as the latest gaming cards, but it isn't far off either, which is good news for games developers hoping to be able to perform Direct3D testing on their animation design workstation. Here, the card's shader power makes itself known.

Workstation accelerators are very application specific, and the best choice of hardware can depend greatly on which specific content creation application you want to use. But initial testing with the FireGL V7350 shows promise for both 3D animation and CAD users. We don't yet have confirmed UK pricing for the V7300 and V7350, but the suggested retail prices are $1,599 and $1,999 respectively (the Sterling price at the top of this review is an estimate based on current exchange rates). Considering that nVidia's Quadro FX 4500 will set you back £1,000 -£1,500, the 1GB FireGL card won't be much more expensive than nVidia's 512MB competitor, and the 512MB V7300 could be cheaper.

However, it's not clear that the FireGL V7350 will ever absolutely trounce the Quadro FX 4500 on performance. We suspect it will come close with many apps, and it's already faster if you use 3dsmax. But it's unlikely to pull ahead in every case. So unless you use texture sets to take advantage of the 1GB memory, it really will be horses for courses, and the choice comes down to which specific software you will mostly be using.